Chapter 10. Brainstorming Techniques
Content creators run out of steam. It is painful, unfortunate, and very, very real. No matter whether you are producing a video, writing a blog post, designing a social media graphic, or even writing a book, burnout is the only thing you can count on 100 percent as you embark on this journey. Fortunately, there are many ways to break out of that funk and into a space of limitless creativity that captivates your audience.
However, to break the blocks that hold back content production, you need to be able to recognize in which of two categories they fall. Although it is entirely possible that both issues are present, there is always one that is prevalent:
Lack of novel content ideas to pursue
Lack of energy and motivation to execute
Throughout this chapter, I share tools to help you overcome each of these obstacles and thrive as a content creator.
SOS: I Can’t Think of New Ideas
First off, yes you can. You always can, and this is perhaps a content creator’s most important mantra. There is always something out there you have not explored, an approach you have not tried, a source of inspiration that you have not even found yet. I am here to help you navigate a stage known as content curation—the act of spotting, filtering, and shaping content ideas for production.
Content curation is, essentially, an act of innovation management. You face the challenge of providing helpful, fresh, shareable content with your audience while preserving differentiation. If you value original content, which you should, you will have a difficult time copying content ideas that competitors have tackled before. Instead, the magic of content curation is our ability to recombine, extrapolate, and experiment with existing ideas to conceive others that seem compelling.
That said, many creators fail at generating new, effective content ideas because they can’t recognize the difference between a frail, incomplete fragment and a full-bodied, robust concept. When brainstorming, we try to force what is just one piece of the puzzle to fill the entire thing. Let’s look at this crucial distinction first.
Content Idea Fragments Versus Concepts
Idea fragments are valuable, yet we run the risk of dismissing them because they feel incomplete. Have you ever sat down to brainstorm content and arrived at a few short words or phrases that you would like to pursue? After some time thinking about content ideas, we tend to reject those that don’t look fully thought-out, whereas we should actually be storing them in an idea fragment bank to merge and expand on later.
Consider a blog about gardening. Suppose that you have been sitting down jotting possible article topics for next month:
Tomatoes
Herbs
Tea tree
Perhaps you took note of these words because they are trending topics in your space, or maybe you looked at a similar site’s blogroll—we will look at content curation sources in the next few pages. Alone, these topics are (incomplete) idea fragments. However, when you combine them with a separate, equally incomplete list of structure formulas, more robust concepts begin taking shape:
30-day challenge
Recipe
Beginner’s guide
Now, at a minimum, combining these three topics and structure formulas leaves us with nine different article ideas. Table 10-1 lists these ideas.
| Tomatoes | Herbs | Tea Tree | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30-day challenge | Sweeter, Juicier Tomatoes: The 30-Day Challenge | Creating a Healthy Herb Garden: The 30-Day Challenge | Growing Tea Tree Oil at Home: The 30-Day Challenge |
| Recipe | 20 Recipes to Try with Seasonal Tomatoes | 10 Ways to Use Your Herbs in Delicious Pasta Dishes | 10 Tea Tree Oil Recipes to Dramatically Improve Your Skin |
| Beginner’s guide | The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Your Own Tomatoes | The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Personal Herb Garden | The Beginner’s Guide to Growing a Tea Tree Garden |
See? You might have hated those Punnet squares in middle school, but breeding content idea fragments sure produces beautiful offspring.
How Exactly Do You Develop Lots of Useful Idea Fragments?
In the last few years, I have found myself going back to the same four curation buckets. Every piece of inspiration I have found that is somehow worth looking into or replicating in the future falls into one of these four categories:
Topics
Structure formulas
Supporting visuals
Headline formulas
Topics are general content areas that are currently getting attention or for which we would like to generate attention in the future. The next part of this chapter introduces a method to find attractive topic areas from various sources. Structure formulas are ways of introducing information that come off as interesting. They vary by medium. Sample structure formulas for text-based content include listicles, essential guides, challenges, and recipes. Some popular structure formulas for videos include step-by-step tutorials, stop-motion animations, and interviews.
Also keep an eye out for effective supporting visuals, graphic resources that make certain content pieces much more compelling and shareable. Perhaps you ran into a long graphic that caught your attention on Pinterest, or a great visual summary of the content within a larger piece. Take note of these graphic devices that strengthen a content piece’s potential. Lastly, collect headline formulas that have had great results for related audiences. Look at other industries, close competitors, and your own past performance for inspiration.
Maintaining a catalog of interesting topics, structures, visuals, and headlines will guarantee higher-quality content brainstorming sessions.
Curating Content Topics: Your Daily Routine
I find routines essential for content creators. Without the right practices and habits in place, your job can become pretty chaotic, pretty fast. As just mentioned, one of our most important responsibilities as creators is to determine which topics deserve our attention and resources. Finding topics for the sake of coming up with something isn’t just wasteful, it’s the fastest road to burnout.
Instead of becoming tied up in a volume game, focus your energies on the effectiveness game. Maintaining a certain number of pieces in production and fulfilling your cadence is important, but not at the cost of performance. Would you rather have one incredibly outstanding piece of content or three nonperforming ones? The answer seems simple. Why, then, do we spend so much time aiming for quantity versus quality?
A daily routine helps us refocus those efforts into more profitable avenues. Throughout the past five years, I have found a very specific strategy that helps me to optimize time and stay on top of my content brainstorming game. It has also made it incredibly easy to avoid “me too” topics, while finding innovative ways to replicate what works. Ready? Here we go.
The No-Waste Content Ideation Matrix
I have identified four kinds of everyday activities that assist effective content ideation: recycle, extend, adapt, and dissect—or READ, which should help you to remember these activities easily. Figure 10-1 presents a visual overview of READ, followed by more detailed descriptions of each activity, along with a detailed explanation of the sources you will need to tap into.
Figure 10-1. The No-Waste Content Ideation Matrix
Recycling
Revamp old pieces that need improvement. There are various reasons why a past piece might have flopped. One thing, however, is true: failures can always be tweaked. How can you turn this piece around? Consider bringing it back after modifying any of these components:
Headline
Supporting imagery
Structure
Channel
Distribution tactics
Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you looked at data for the past 30 days and found that this article was your worst-performing piece of the month:
50 Brilliant Keynote Templates to Present Like a Pro
Brainstorm as many headlines as possible and consider resharing the piece after switching it to something like the following:
The 50 Best Keynote Templates of 2016
50 Stunning Presentation Templates You Won’t Believe Are Keynote
50 Creative Keynote Templates That Totally Stand Out
Note
Be careful about how you modify URLs as you tweak these headlines. Certain articles might have a decent number of inbound links (i.e., other sites are linking back to this content) that you are better off capitalizing on. In these cases, you can either leave the original URL (changing the title) or apply a redirect to point those inbound visitors to the new version of the article.
Sometimes, you will find that a title change isn’t necessary. For these cases, look at the article’s supporting images and detect opportunities for a longer recap graphic to serve to a more visual-driven audience (think Pinterest). You could also modify your distribution strategy by reaching out to the creators whose work you are featuring in the piece. They might be willing to share it among their own audience, because you are highlighting the quality of their product. This last approach works for many different industries.
What you will need for this activity
You’ll need a continuously updated list of your all-time underperforming articles. Even though the definition of “underperforming” can vary, content consumption metrics like low pageviews, sessions, or users (depending on what you are tracking—see Chapter 2) can point to recycling opportunities. You also can decide, for example, that a low Page Authority (largely an SEO-related metric) is the main indicator of underperformance. In this case, the recycling priority could be to fix the article’s internal structure in a way that favors bot crawlability and the page’s chances at ranking better in search engines.
Extending
Serialize your past successes. Find top-performing pieces within your own catalog and think of novel ways to scale what worked there. Consider reviewing the section “Basics of Repurposing Content” in Chapter 7. Although figuring out the one success factor behind a piece might be difficult, looking at groups of content pieces can provide a better picture. Are all of your review pieces getting significantly more attention than the rest? How about your trend roundups? Is it worth creating a series out of these structures?
As an example, imagine that this your most successful piece in the last 30 days:
How to Get Rid of Impostor Syndrome Once and For All
Analyze the piece and look for potential success factors. As pointed out earlier, looking at a single article might not give you enough evidence to move forward. Look at your top 10 or 20 list of star performers and find commonalities. Suppose that this article sat at number five:
How to Take Care of a Burned-Out Designer
If you begin connecting the dots, something will soon become evident: impostor syndrome and burnout are both psychological phenomena that affect one’s creative ability. Why not extend the first article’s success by creating a series to help readers remove all kinds of blocks? How to Get Rid of X Once and For All could be a great structure and headline formula to target many issues affecting your audience.
Having a routine for content extensions is particularly important when you work with a very limited list of topics and must produce many related pieces. If you manage a fitness blog that supports supplement product sales, for instance, you might find yourself having to produce five articles that deal with the same subtheme: “Weight Loss Supplements.” The Extension routine will help you to consistently spin different pieces from a single “core” article.
Now, many content managers see the word series and immediately picture some kind of persistent branding, tagline, and cadence. Even though those kinds of series are effective and might be just the right thing for you, extending your success does not need to be that complex at all. You can turn a successful concept into a series that fulfills a merely editorial planning purpose: you and your team know what the common thread is that’s holding all these articles together, but that does not necessarily need to be apparent for your audience, too.
What you will need for this activity
You’ll need a continuously updated list of your all-time top-performing articles. As with bad performance, great performance depends on the eye of the beholder. Some popular approaches include listing articles with the most pageviews, sessions, or users. You also could watch out for pieces succeeding at engagement metrics like shares, comments, time on page, or referral traffic.
Adapting
Extrapolate successes from other industries. In this scenario, extrapolation is just importing something that works in one space to a different one. By extrapolating, you are assuming that a certain “foreign” success factor will also apply to your industry.
If you are in the fitness space, for instance, consider how something that has worked in fashion or parenting might work for your audience. As risky as this might sound, the potential gains are equally unpredictable. Create a list of content creators in different spaces whose traction you admire. Think about the brands behind the pieces that are winning the shares, traffic, or comments game. Whatever your core goal is, come up with a list of those who have mastered it. Look at top website rankings by category, and focus on those that steer away from your comfort zone. Follow them and consider how their approach could come to life in your own space. Who knows, you might end up pioneering a content trend in your industry!
Suppose that you have been following content creators in industries like fashion and food, but your space is productivity. Imagine that you detected that this was an extremely popular piece for them last month:
17 Unconventional Wedding Bands to Try
Put your own spin on it and consider what 17 Unconventional Planners to Try might look like. As you can imagine, this technique works for various kinds of text, audio, image, and video-based content pieces. Picture a situation in which the following is the most popular video for a certain brand’s channel outside your space:
5 Amazing Food Life Hacks Everyone Must Know
Again, analyze how you can import this concept to your own content space. 5 Amazing Productivity Hacks Everyone Must Know would be a solid first step. There are, however, other innovative approaches you could take to adapt it:
Enlarge it: 20 Amazing Productivity Hacks Everyone Must Know
Shrink it: The One Amazing Productivity Hack Everyone Must Know
Segment it: 5 Amazing Productivity Hacks Every Entrepreneur Must Know
Mystify it: 5 Amazing Productivity Secrets Everyone Must Know
Exaggerate it: 5 Mind-Blowing Productivity Hacks Everyone Must Know
Give extrapolation a try and see where this method takes you. In adapting effective techniques from industries outside yours, you are using combinatorial creativity in your favor. With time, your ability to create new content combinations from existing pieces will prove an essential asset to maintain an innovative editorial calendar.
What you will need for this activity
You’ll need a continuously curated list of interesting topics, headline formulas, structures, and supporting visuals from brands in other spaces. For a description of these items, go back to the beginning of this chapter. Interestingly enough, there are tools to detect how successful these third-party pieces are, despite not being able to access those brands’ analytics. Content analysis tools like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs shed some light into other sites’ performance.
Dissecting
Replicate competitors’ or similar brands’ successes with an added layer of depth. Perhaps you have seen something truly worth replicating coming from brands in your same space. This activity is, by far, the trickiest of them all. Pulling off adaptation without yelling “me too” is challenging. Finding the right angle to share your own take on something is the first step in any successful content replication.
On one hand, you do not want to sacrifice that unique voice your audience knows and loves you for, nor do you want to project a lack of originality. Nobody likes a copycat. On the other hand, it is smart to take note of bets that have worked for others to avoid assuming the risk yourself. Every time a brand invests time and resources in a piece of content, there is a chance it will fail entirely. When you monitor successful approaches among competitors or somewhat similar sites, you are actually hoping to learn from their mistakes. Behind every successful piece they share, there was some trial and error required to arrive at that concept. You are looking at the final result, not how this content piece came about.
That said, replicate with caution, add a twist, and—whenever possible—experiment with headlines, imagery, structure, channels, or distribution tactics.
Let’s look at an example. You sell marketing automation software and have been following your competitor’s content for a while now. Suddenly, you find out that its top performer last week was this:
Why Some Things Go Viral—And Others Don’t
Establish what your area of expertise is and then you could narrow this concept down:
Why Some Tweets Go Viral—And Others Flop
Even though this is already slightly different from your competitor’s approach, we can be much more creative. Use these prompts to help you adapt its success in a way that works for you:
Segment it: Why Some DIY Pins Go Viral—And Others Don’t
Quantify it: 10 Reasons Why Tweets Go Viral
Mystify it: The Surprising Reason Why Some Tweets Go Viral
Shrink it: The ONE Difference Between Tweets That Go Viral and Those That Don’t
Exaggerate it: Why Some Videos Go Crazy Viral—And Others Flop
What you will need for this activity
You’ll need a continuously curated list of interesting topics, headline formulas, structures, and supporting visuals from brands in your space. These can be direct competitors, brands offering substitute products, or even companies that target your same audience with a different product/service. Again, there are many tools to look behind the scenes of what is happening with this “list of brands to keep an eye on.”
Your Daily Brainstorming Routine
Let’s break down this daily method into a simple list of steps:
Create a list of your all-time top-performing content pieces. Alternatively, use your analytics package to design an automatically updated report.
Create a list of your all-time underperforming content pieces. Again, alternatively, use your analytics package to design an automatically updated report.
Create a file or digital bookmark folder (Pinterest board, Evernote notebook, Pocket tag, you name it). Save interesting topics, headline formulas, structures, and supporting visuals from brands in other spaces. To select these brands, consider their success in the specific performance metrics for which you are aiming.
Use a different tag, board, or folder in your bookmarking service to save interesting topics, headlines, structures, and visuals from brands in your same space. These can be competitors or brands that sell something different to the same audience.
Make sure you update these idea sources continuously.
Check them out every day for:
1 to 2 pieces worth recycling
1 to 2 pieces worth turning into a series or extending
1 to 2 pieces worth adapting from other industries
1 to 2 pieces worth replicating and dissecting with more depth
The number of pieces you are able to tackle every day logically depends on your availability. One is a healthy minimum to work with, but feel free to further spread out these activities in a way that fits your work schedule.
Lots of Ideas, No Motivation
At the beginning of this chapter, I shared how content blocks fall under two main categories:
Lack of novel content ideas to pursue
Lack of energy and motivation to execute
We have already looked at techniques to generate increasingly innovative ideas, but that leaves us at a point at which we have a ton of pending tasks that require execution. Great content ideas are nothing without equally great production. Although some of us enjoy ideation, the actual doing (writing, editing, publishing, coding, illustrating) can be the most challenging piece of the puzzle.
To begin with, the mindset required to brainstorm tons of ideas seems entirely different from the kind of mentality that allows someone to sit down and follow through. Whereas the first is about divergent thinking and going all over the place, the second is about focusing and executing. This is precisely why I suggest that you either a) assign these tasks to different team members or b) make sure these tasks are performed on different dates.
Let me explain that further: brainstorming and producing content require wearing two different hats. When coming up with ideas and idea fragments, acting controlled and single-minded can only hurt. You need to give your mind some serious breathing space: the time and resources to wander and return with imperfect concepts. Quality and performance are not relevant at this point.
Producing content, on the other hand, requires a unique type of focus that is closer to control than freedom. Granted, content creators still need to preserve a sense of openness to new ideas during the execution phase. This openness, however, isn’t nearly as prevalent as it is in the brainstorming stage. Ask any prolific content producer and they will confirm this: writing/illustrating/producing is about putting in the hours—even if you don’t feel like it. Even Picasso, a fine artist, confessed that “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
Finding the Motivation to Produce Content
Perhaps you are going through the best moment in your entire career. Perhaps this motivation slump has not hit you yet. Maybe you are skimming through this section thinking, “Ehh, this does not really apply to me…nope.” That is okay. It’s more than okay. I would just invite you to bookmark the next few pages, because it will eventually dawn on you: content production is inevitably full of ups and downs.
You have a great list of topics to tackle, the team to make it happen, and an audience waiting to watch. The only barrier between you and successful content is that little voice in your head that keeps distracting you. Throughout my career, I have found that motivation isn’t something that can be forced, drunk, or bought. You won’t find it by talking about it, and you certainly won’t find it watching TV. It is the kind of thing you need to train for every single day. If you truly value your motivation—which you should—it is going to take a few life decisions to make it stay on as long as possible.
Avoiding Motivation Sinkholes
In this section, we isolate and analyze a content creator’s main motivation drainers and how we can make smarter decisions to avoid them.
Impossibly High Expectations
Ever faced unattainable goals? Extremely tight deadlines and unrealistic workloads can drain motivation out of anyone. Sure, we have all felt the slight rush of completing something despite severe time constraints, the adrenaline of delivering more than was humanly expected of us. There is nothing wrong with those sporadic stretches. The real problem comes when they go from occasional to routine. When every day feels like a heavy sprint, and at the end you are not 100 percent lucid enough to realize that your abilities are deteriorating. Mental and physical strain often come without warning and hit us as a result of long periods during which we have abused our own ability to deliver. Watch out for unhealthy practices that might not hurt you today, but will deplete your motivation if assumed in the long run.
Drawing Comparisons
I can’t stress this enough: content creators need to avoid comparing their work with that of total strangers. Furthermore, we must not see ourselves as content consumers and realize that, as producers, we need time and distance from what is already out there in order to create truly innovative work. If you are always exposing your mind to others’ work, when will you gain the strength to create your own? Find a balance between inspiration and creation, and make sure that the first is indeed inspiring. What might begin as a journey to gather ideas can quickly become a shortcut to discouragement. Know when to stop.
Topic Burnout
So, you have been writing, speaking, or designing pieces about the same topic for the past 10 years. It is only natural that, at some point, you feel like you have run out of ideas to elaborate on. In these cases, the best recommendation I can share is to tune out of your main topic area for some time. Explore related, novel topics that your audience might still find fascinating. If the burnout becomes serious, you even can go completely outside your space and experiment with creating content for a different brand or channel. Resetting your brain that way can bring the renewed energies and much-needed motivation to thrive in your space again.
Unnecessary Drama
Fights, disagreements, and tough words are unquestionable motivation killers. Surrounding yourself with nontoxic environments is 100 percent your responsibility. If the people with whom you work or space in which you are working is hurting the quality of your content, it is up to you to switch. Even if you work at an office from nine to five, there are ways to make your space unique and establish limits that empower your work. When in doubt, remember that what you allow is what will continue. Focus on building a healthy creative environment that supports you and your team’s ambitions.
Avoidable Repetition
Routines, when properly designed, are smart. You figure out a workflow that makes you extra efficient and follow it every single day, week, or month. You know what everyone hates, though? Repeating the unnecessary. We will discuss content automation further along, but at this point I want to share how engaging in avoidable repetition can drain your motivation. There are tasks naturally suited for humans, and there are tasks we are better off assigning to machines. We are uniquely equipped to generate insights and complete projects that require intuition, empathy, listening, imagination, and emotional intelligence. Machines, robots, and automation tools can take on routine tasks that free up our time to commit to those other creative endeavors. Whenever I find that a trivial task is taking up the time that I could be devoting to a more impactful initiative, I ask myself: Is there a tool that could facilitate this? Keep an eye out for solutions that allow you to save precious time and resources. Here are some examples of tasks that can now be fully automated:
- Content report generation
- Granted, you need to set up the software properly. Google Analytics, for example, offers a feature with which you can send weekly emails attaching any given custom report.
- Supporting image exports at different sizes
- Canva, for instance, has a “Magic Resize” feature to automatically export graphics that are ideally suited for various social media sites.
- Project management software task creation based on triggers
- Zapier is an example of a workflow automation app that can help you connect, for instance, a Slack message with the creation of an Asana task. Someone on your team could send an instant message about the need to fix an issue, and you could turn it into an Asana task just by starring it.
If you are having to go through purposeless data processing over and over again, there might be room for process improvement. In the meantime, all your creative and executional energy is going to boring, stale, tedious places.
Team Mistrust
We can all agree that proper delegating can take weight off your shoulders. However, this is useful only if you can fully trust your team members or external collaborators to deliver quality work. I have seen this happen most frequently when dealing with freelance creators: you submit clear instructions for a content piece and receive back middle-school-level work. This is true for text, image, and audiovisual deliverables. Not trusting those who create for you is a drag.
If, on top of that, you are under severe time constraints, this means that you will take on a massive load of extra work. And you know what everyone hates? Extra work. Yet there you are, sitting with a pile of to-do’s that someone else was supposed to complete. You do it, once, twice, and then you begin falling into a certain habit—the dangerous habit of reworking every single stage of production, slowly burning out, one edit at a time.
Assess whether the team member you can’t fully trust has the ability to learn from mistakes, take critique in stride, and incorporate feedback in every new task. The desire and skill it takes to iterate is a valuable asset for your team; it can become more important than talent itself under certain circumstances. Much too often, I stop working with brilliant writers because they can’t adjust to editorial requirements, or improve their work based on negative audience feedback. The talent is there, but the will to grow is not. Such disdain for the tasks at hand can decimate your motivation as a manager, and that is when you know it is time to find another collaborator. Indeed, I have found that content creators with relentless determination to improve end up being more valuable contributors to the production process.
Small-Picture Thinking
What is this article/video/image doing for the company again? Somewhere along the way, you have lost track of how your daily tasks connect with the brand’s mission. And when you forget that, it is impossible to articulate your work’s importance in front of others—and even yourself! It becomes increasingly difficult to see the value in your everyday goals. To avoid falling into the trap of small-picture thinking, write down clearly how your content production efforts tie back to the brand’s larger vision. Hang it somewhere close to you, stick it to your laptop, get a tattoo if you have to. Just don’t lose sight of it, because understanding your larger impact is one of the keys to ongoing motivation.
Lack of Personal Engagement
How does this tie back to my goals? If you are creating content for a personal brand, the answer to this question might be crystal clear. I say might because I have seen enough cases for which it is not. People and companies create brands and use content to share those brands’ stories, yet they somehow forget that connection along the way. People join companies to create content strategies because, at some point, they identified some kind of career alignment with the job. Is that you?
In any case, it is crucial to reconnect your personal goals with everyday content activities. How is this getting me any closer to the professional point where I want to be? For some more insight into this, take a look at the upcoming sidebar.
Professional Dissatisfaction
I left this one for last because it demands the toughest life decisions. If you have come this far but feel discontent with the way things work in your space, maybe it is time to experiment with moving into new areas. Perhaps you have dedicated the last few years to the travel content industry but realized that you will never be comfortable with certain aspects. Maybe airports and flights bore you, or expensive meals are just not your thing to cover. You can do one of two things to regain your motivation to create: transform your space or completely exit it. That is how new budget travel and local travel content creators are emerging, and it is also how some successful travel influencers switch to lifestyle content. The possibilities are endless as long as you are engaged with the type of content you are producing.